A federal judge ruled Monday that publishing an entire article without the rights holder’s authorization was a fair use of the work, in yet another blow to newspaper copyright troll Righthaven.

It’s not often that republishing an entire work without permission is deemed fair use.: Fair use is an infringement defense when the defendant reproduced a copyrighted work for purposes such as criticism, commentary, teaching and research. The defense is analyzed on a case-by-case basis.

Monday’s ruling: dismissed: a lawsuit brought by Righthaven, a Las Vegas-based: copyright litigation factory jointly owned with newspaper publisher Stephens Media. The venture’s litigation tactics and ethics are being questioned by several judges and attorneys, a factor that also weighed in on U.S. District Judge Philip Pro’s decision Monday.

Not really a big surprise. : One of the points: I made at this month’s CSUSA panel on this topic was that when you push too hard on enforcement, someone who matters – either legislators, judges or rampaging mobs – will punish you and leave in a place that is outside what you thought defined the range of outcomes. : In a bad way.

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Big IP never wants to hear this until it’s too late. : But there is a sort of rough justice in such an outcome, for it is the mirror-image, by alternative (i.e., judicial) means, of a legislative scheme that says, as the Copyright Act does, “Don’t think your damages are limited to what you would have had to pay if you had not infringed. : There is a big: penalty, via attorneys’ fees and statutory damages, for doing it this way. : Cross at the green, not in-between.” : I have argued for some time that the one-sidedness of this equation, which does not account for the welfare detriment caused by abusive and overreaching litigation, is unsustainable. : I have expressed hope for a legislative improvement in copyright policy, though, not a judicial one. : That hope may be vain – and now it may be the exact opposite of what happens.

Was it a: foreseeable: risk that judges might blow past traditional bounds of fair use to make a point in a situation such as this? : There will be plenty of analysis on the question, as there ought to be, considering the following excerpts from the opinion (the link to which Randazza emailed me during the bleary-eyed hours last night). : Just working off the Wired article, here are some … interesting concepts.

One of them is that the court found a lack of standing, yet went ahead and ruled on the fair use issue anyway, writing, “Assuming Righthaven was found to have standing to bring this action, the Court nonetheless finds Hoehn is entitled to summary judgment on the ground of fair use of the Work.”: That is rather unusual, and arguably resulted in a holding that is dictum. : It could also be described as an alternative ground for dismissing the complaint, of course, but, again, the court went the extra mile to make not only a point about fair use, but an arguably controversial one.

Moreover, the finding of fair use was based here on (a) a holding that the use was non-commercial, which (b) militated against applying the traditional rule that copying an entire work is: prima facie infringement, or at least that the use of the work has a strong presumption against fair use in light of (c) the fact that there was no cognizable impairment of the economic value of the copyright. : The court makes this seem quite straightforward. : This factor certainly is, as the: Media Bloggers Association brief filed in another Righthaven case in Nevada argues, certainly a significant one in the fair use analysis (which we could not urge in full, because the procedural posture was one of default judgment) and must be considered with respect to awarding damages, including statutory damages. : Fine, as far as it goes.

But every pendulum has its amplitude, and then it swings back.: Read More…